


Just another place with sand between its toes

by pollitt



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-04
Updated: 2011-08-04
Packaged: 2017-11-01 14:35:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollitt/pseuds/pollitt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t think about the weird things you’ll miss until they’re impossible to get.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just another place with sand between its toes

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Maverick for the beta and the title suggestion. Title take from the tag line for Kona’s Brewing Co.

Danny’s not sure what it is that wakes him up--a sound, a spidey sense, the combination of a cop’s instinct and a parent’s hypersensitivity--but he goes from warm and lazy and dreaming to wide awake and heart racing in between one breath and the next.

The sheets next to him are cool to the touch and for a still sleep groggy moment Danny feels his stomach sour before the logical and more awake part of his brain kicks in. He lets out a shaky breath as he reminds himself that Steve’s back--Danny _has him back_ \--and the sheets and the bunched up pillow on Steve’s side of the bed are all the evidence that Danny needs to prove this is the case.

Still, something woke him up, and seeing as how he’s more awake than not _and_ lord knows what Steve has gotten up to for long enough to make his side of the bed cold...

“I swear to all things holy if he’s going for a midnight swim or run or backpacking excursion I will kill him with my bare hands,” Danny says as he searches for his slippers.*

Steve hasn’t gone on a moonlight adventure, much to Danny’s relief. He finds him sitting on one of the chairs at the edge of the beach--a beer in one hand and the box of pizza from their dinner earlier in the evening open on the small table next to him.

Steve turns his head slightly as Danny sits down in the empty chair.

“I missed this,” Steve says, holding his slice of pizza in front of him as if he were examining it in the light of the moon.

“Pizza in general? Or Kona’s specifically? I need a little more information here babe, seeing how it’s,” Danny checked his watch, “three in the morning and I am not at my sharpest.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth lifts in a silent smile--a smile that reaches all the way up and crinkles the corner of his eye. “Cold pizza, actually. And Kona’s specifically. You don’t think about the weird things you’ll miss until they’re impossible to get. It was the same way when I enlisted--couldn’t get my hands on peppermint patties without trading my soul. And forget about frozen ones.”

“That explains a lot about you right there.” Danny snags himself a pizza slice from the open box. “As well as why there’s a never-ending stash in your freezer.”

“Good eye, Detective Williams.” Steve takes a pull of beer. “It’s not that the prison food was bad, all things considered. But I never really appreciate how good a cold piece of pizza and a cold beer--especially Kona’s--tasted until then.”

There is all together too much and nothing Danny can say in answer to that--even if he could talk over the lump that’s taken up residence in his throat. So he settles for reaching his hand out between them and clearing his throat.

“I’m guessing, based on the lack of evidence of a second beer, that you were struck with your sudden craving and weren’t expecting company so... hand it over.”

Steve complies and Danny takes a long drink.

Instead of handing the bottle back over, he sets it on one of the grease and cheese stained empty spaces in the pizza box and holds his hand out, palm up. He clears his throat again.

Steve looks quickly at Danny’s offered hand, and then up at Danny, and when he smiles, Danny’s whole chest does a weird flip-and-flutter.

“Thanks, Danno,” Steve says, sliding his palm along Danny’s and lacing their fingers together.

“It’s the little things, right?”

“Yeah.”

They stay outside until the first streaks of light start to appear on the horizon.

 

* Danny has warmed up to a lot of things about Hawaii, but if there is one thing (of many) that he really doesn’t care for, it’s walking on sand that’s been tracked onto the floor. And at Steve’s, it’s all but a given that the tiny pieces of rock, basalt, silica and crushed up shells and fossils (From Gracie Williams’s definition of sand composition) will be found in every room of Steve’s home. So the first thing Danny left at Steve’s--before his toothbrush, even--was a pair of slippers.


End file.
